Glastonbury 2010: How Dizzee and the performers psyched up

Whether you're busking in the Green Fields or headlining the Pyramid Stage, there's no place like Glastonbury for a performer. Laura Barton went backstage with Dizzee Rascal, Shakira and others to see how they prepare for the gig of their lives

Dizzee Rascal: Friday evening, Pyramid Stage

Dizzee Rascal is now something of a Glastonbury veteran, having played the festival "three or four" times, including a memorable guest appearance with Arctic Monkeys. But long before he first appeared here, he had clear ideas about what it would be like. "Muddy, muddy, muddy," he says. "And I imagined it would be all like Oasis and Blur were back in the day." When he finally got there, it did little to change his mind. "No," he says flatly. "It was pretty much like that."

It was his turn with Arctic Monkeys on the Pyramid Stage in 2007 that changed his perspective. "That opened my eyes," he says. "I thought I'd just go, do it, just for something to do. But they were the biggest rock band at the time."

These days, he is rapidly becoming a festival institution, a prototype Joe Strummer or Billy Bragg of sorts. "It's the festival with the biggest tradition behind it," he adds, with some affection. "And I always get mobbed here." This year, he has returned to play the Pyramid Stage once more, but higher up the bill than last year, in the slot between Vampire Weekend and headliners Gorillaz – a testament to both his phenomenal chart success and the quality of his previous Glastonbury performances.

Dizzee left Sheffield at nine o'clock this morning, spent the journey playing Street Fighter and World Cup computer games, and only arrived backstage half an hour ago. "I'd hung about in the car park to watch last night's [Sheffield] showin the van. I watch as much as I can, to see what I can improve," he explains. "Today, I'll be doing pretty much the same show as last night, but shorter, an hour." He will, however, let the festival audience dictate the mood a little: "I perform to them, vibe with them, man," he says.

This year, he will be joined on stage by a full band, and Florence and the Machine will make an appearance for a rendition of their mash-up You Got the Dirtee Love. He is a little withdrawn ahead of his show, sitting in the shade, pristine in all white, save for a chocolate smudge on his shorts. "I love this year that it's sunny," he says, brightening. "And I'm looking forward to meeting Snoop; I've never met him before."

The crowd before the Pyramid is vast, stretching far away up the hill in the evening sun. Dizzee takes to the stage in a haze of smoke, wearing an England shirt, its back emblazoned with the words "Dizzee 10". The crowd jostle and roar, and a host of hangers-on – friends, family, journalists, other musicians, including Seasick Steve and Alex Turner from Arctic Monkeys – muscle to the side of the stage to watch.

His show is gigantic, boundless, a great ferocious beast of a thing, rampaging through Jus' a Rascal and Holiday and a mash-up of Stand Up Tall and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, until Florence takes to the stage like a whirling dervish, and the crowd, young, old, and already in the sweaty throes of near-madness, reaches full-on hysteria.

He finishes with Bonkers, and then bounds off stage, leaving the crowd to wait, sweaty and awestruck, for Gorillaz. "I'm just hype, really hype, when I come off stage," he says, gleeful, in his element now the show is done. "You can't do all that and just go back and go to sleep. I need to pat down backstage for a bit . . . " he shrugs. "I'll probably just play some more computer."

Shakira: Saturday evening, Pyramid Stage

Two weeks before Glastonbury began, the Colombian singer Shakira opened the World Cup in South Africa, performing the tournament's official song, Waka Waka (This Time for Africa), to a crowd of 40,000 people at the Orlando Stadium in Soweto. Shakira, who is the most successful female Latin American singer in the world and has sold more than 50m albums, made a logical choice for the World Cup opening celebrations. Her appearance at Glastonbury, however, was less predictable; though her children's charity, the Barefoot Foundation, chimes sweetly with the festival's own charitable ethos, her music is perhaps more mainstream pop than much of the festival's billing.

Shakira calls from the car carrying her from Heathrow airport to central London, three days before she is due to grace the Pyramid Stage. She is well aware, she assures me, of Glastonbury's reputation. "I know it's probably the most important festival in Europe, and I know it's the 40th anniversary, so this is an extra-special one," she says. "And I know there are hundreds of acts, and people camp . . . and I know apparently it's going to be sunny – but I brought my waterproof mascara just in case."

"I'm very intrigued about the crowd at Glastonbury; I think it will be different from my audiences before. You know the public usually have this perceptive intelligence, it's almost metaphysical, and they can almost tell when an artist is in tune with what they do. When I'm on stage, the audience connect with me if I am completely present in my body and mind. They feel me. It doesn't matter where you're playing."

She is eager to sing live again; of late, she has found herself holed up in television and radio studios promoting her latest album, She Wolf. "TV performances leave you no room for errors: three minutes, no dark circles under your eyes, you look great. But you never have the energy, the energy of the audience that you feel going out on stage. I want to reconnect with that side of me that gets buried beneath all the promo," she says, "I want to show that rock'n'roll chick is still there! It's an opportunity to express myself in the purest possible way."

On Saturday afternoon, a strikingly large crowd has amassed to see Shakira take to the stage in tight jeans and a knotted white T-shirt. There are football fans and pop lovers, die-hard devotees of the woman herself, of course, but also, one assumes, a large number of festival-goers who fancy basking in a little warm pop on a sunny afternoon. She does not disappoint, serving up not only a cover of Islands by the XX, but, reassuringly, all the hits: Whenever, Wherever, Hips Don't Lie, Underneath Your Clothes, and, of course, Waka Waka.

Some while later she is sitting in a yurt, backstage. "How hippy is this?" she smiles. "Playing Glastonbury was better even than I expected," she says. "I enjoyed it so much. The crowd completely seduced me – it was an ocean of people, and they participated in every song, like a constant crescendo." She came off stage, she says, and headed to her dressing room for a Gatorade. Since then it has been photographs and interviews and a live set for the BBC. Shortly, she will be leaving in a helicopter, heading back to London before returning to South Africa for the end of the World Cup. "But tomorrow," she says proudly, "I'm going to go to a pub in east London and watch the England match."

Flaming Lips: The Other Stage, Friday night

Wayne Coyne is on the line from Oklahoma, his dogs yip-yapping in the background. It is a week until his band, The Flaming Lips, will make their third appearance at the Glastonbury festival. "I'm not at liberty to say what I'm going to do," he says cautiously, "because sometimes if I say I'm going to do something, they put a stop to it for health and safety reasons." Indeed, Flaming Lips shows are famed for their outlandish spectacles: people dancing in animal costumes, glitter, smoke, and Coyne rolling out across the crowd inside a giant inflatable ball he has christened the Space Bubble. "But anyway," he continues, "we get burst out on to the stage through this cosmic woman's undulating vagina, and there'll be a lot of fantastical moments while we play these songs."

On the Friday afternoon, Coyne meets me backstage, by a sculpture of an elephant. The band arrived at the festival last night, travelling by plane and bus from a festival in Croatia. "We stopped at Stonehenge on the way," he tells me. "But you know, I'm still wondering what a henge is." Last night, Coyne and his wife shared a bottle of wine and went wandering around the festival. "It was awesome," he enthuses. "The thing about Glastonbury is that you can have fires, and it completely changes the atmosphere."

This morning he awoke and did some yoga by the side of the bus. "I just do it in my underwear," he informs me, and pulls down the waistband of his trousers to reveal a pair of red and white Y-fronts. "After that, I had some water and fruit and waited for the toilets to be cleaned out. In the men's toilets there are lots of urinals, but not many places to do the other thing, you know? In the end, my wife escorted me into the ladies." He laughs. "See," he says, "there's no glamour!"

When we spoke the previous week, Coyne talked of how the band would pass the time before the show: hanging out, smoking pot, meeting old friends, new friends, other performers. "Younger bands have a lot more hangers-on, and people thinking it's the best party ever. We still have some of that, but . . . all the drink and the drugs? You can never escape the physical aspect of feeling like shit the next day." Still, he enjoys seeing others living it up. "People are only young for a short time," he says, "and that period between 18 and 25 is a magical time, and it's wonderful to be one of the bands that people see in that period of their lives."

Today he is planning to consume merely "a couple of Red Bulls before I go on stage" to ensure he has the energy required for the set. "I'm not an extrovert," he insists, despite his larger-than-life stage persona. "But perhaps that is the real me up there. It started out as a defence mechanism, doing crazy shit up there, and now, well, we've been the Flaming Lips since I was 22, and I'll be 50 next year."

Shortly before half past 10, the Other Stage is crowded with orange crates, orange guitar cases, orange amps. Crowds of dancers mill about in matching Day-Glo, eye-popping orange elf outfits, as Strange Brew spills out of the soundsystem.

Suddenly, the smoke machine begins to huff, and the floor starts to vibrate, and a roadie hauls a net of enormous multicoloured balloons into the wings; there is a general sense that something amazing is about to happen. And indeed it does. As promised, the band members slide through the cosmic woman's undulating vagina on to the stage, and then Coyne emerges, inside the inflating Space Bubble, grinning like a maniac. He rolls slowly forward, to the brink of the stage and is carried out onto the audience, held aloft by eager arms.

To see the Flaming Lips tonight is a thing of wonder: there are giant orange gorillas, men in grape-coloured spandex and towering inflatable frogs. There are streamers and strobe lights and lasers. There is anti-Bush rhetoric and pleas for world peace and red fog that clouds out from the end of a bullhorn. "A lot of you guys don't know this, but this is the festival," Coyne tells the crowd, a little hoarse as he nears the closing song, a heart-exploding rendition of Do You Realize?? "Everyone has copied this festival!" he calls, and the crowd blooms into cheers and applause.

Ten minutes later, Coyne is standing in the wings amid the confetti and the streamers, as his orange-clad roadies pack away guitars, cables, confetti guns. He appears delighted by the performance. "I wonder sometimes, 'Is this going to work?'" he admits, voice broken, hair clinging to his forehead, "I'm always so frightened. And there were a couple of moments tonight during the strobes when I put the bull-horn down and then forgot where I put it. I was trying to find it in the smoke and worried I would run into the gong . . . " he grins wildly and laughs. "Ha!" he declares. "I'll bet Thom Yorke doesn't have that problem!"

Laura Marling: The Park Stage, Saturday night

"I'm not a huge fan of festivals – I'm an enormous wet blanket." Laura Marling is on the line from Portland, Maine, midway through her US tour. "But I do like playing them," she insists. "I do."

Marling arrived on the British folk scene in 2008 with her debut Alas, I Cannot Swim. Hers was a talent un-hothoused by stage school, her songwriting immediately suggesting a young woman substantially older than her years, while her voice bore no twinge of blue-eyed soul, but rather a clear, sharp, bugle-crisp quality that set her apart from her contemporaries.

Still just 20 years old, Marling returned this spring with her second album, I Speak Because I Can. It is an exceptional record, which won critical acclaim, reached No 4 in the album charts, and displayed a new maturity to Marling's songwriting and perhaps to her demeanour: when she toured her last album she was still a teenager, shy, self-effacing, at times reticent. This time around, she seems suddenly a woman, bolder in her word and her performance.

Marling arrived in Somerset on Friday night, travelling from Bath, where she had played the night before. She will leave on Sunday afternoon, but will stay off-site, in a nearby B&B. There were a total of nine travelling in the van, five band members, and four crew. "Today was a good day," she says, sitting backstage at the Park, where she will play at half past nine, "because it's Saturday, and I'm sorry, I know you're the Guardian, but it's the Times jumbo crossword day. And that's what we do on the bus – me and my cello player start it, but we can never finish it."

She is warming up to the festival season now, preparing to play the Serpentine in London next, and later Hop Farm and Green Man. "There's a good vibe to those shows," she says, "and I get to see a lot of bands I like, so it's convenient in that way; convenient but terrifying." She has to plan a set for a festival, she says – "step up a notch" is how she puts it. "And this album is good for this, I think. This album suits festivals more, which is quite a revelation."

Backstage there will be two bottles of red wine, 20 beers, eight local ales, a bottle of whiskey, and a bit of hanging out with other bands. "And we have a kind of cheesy band hug before we go on stage," she says. Tonight, they will play for an hour. "Though that may be stretching it. I may try to fill it out with a bit of chat or some stand-up."

Between songs, Marling can often seem at her most awkward; it is easy to forget, with the maturity of her music, the youth that lies beneath. But as she takes to the stage tonight, she seems quite at ease. "It's good to be back at the Park Stage," she says. Behind her sit her band – keys, cello, guitar, drums, double bass – and beyond them the sky, a darkening blueish-pink.

It is perhaps the most beautiful set of the festival, her voice fitting the cooling evening air quite perfectly. She jokes with the audience, asks them to whistle a violin solo, and at one point announces that there has just been a successful marriage proposal down in the front row. Afterwards, Marling admits to feeling "quite overwhelmed. This has been . . . I don't think words can describe how it has been." And she heads off into the night with Mumford & Sons, to watch Jamie T play the John Peel Tent.

Dook Box and His Bandit: Green Fields, Saturday afternoon

On a wooden bandstand in the Green Fields, two men are playing traditional folk tunes in the afternoon sun. One is seated, playing the fiddle, while his foot works a strange metal contraption – a steel-pedal guitar attached to pulleys and levers and a wheel, that makes a steady, rattling sound, like a train. To the right stands a man with two tambourines, bells strung around his waist and his shirt sleeves. He keeps time with his left leg, roots his weight with his right foot.

They play for nearly an hour. Behind them, people are hula-hooping on the grass, while others sit reading newspapers. Spectators come and go, stay for a song or two, drift on: two young men, bare-chested in shorts, crouch low to inspect the intricate workings of the contraption. At one point, a passing mandolin player in denim dungarees and bare feet climbs up and joins in, before selling CDs set out in their violin case: the cover revealing the act to be named Dook Box and His Bandit.

Dook Box is in fact Philip Wickenden, 63, a tool-maker from Cadbury Heath, near Bath. The Bandit is his invention, the wheeled guitar contraption at his feet. It took him three years to perfect. "I had a mate who played guitar for me, we worked out a lot of tunes together, some of them quite complicated, but then he got poached by another band." Wickenden was at a loss for a while, but then, sitting on the bus to work one morning he had a thought: "I said to myself: 'You've got to be able to play the guitar with your feet!' So I tried – I laid it down and tried to strum with my big toe and chord with my left foot. But then I thought: I've got to make a machine to do it."

The tambourine player, Alan James Waters, 56, from Bath, is a former DJ, once known as Sir Wellington, who met Wickenden outside the city's pump rooms a year ago, and took up the tambourine in order to play with him. "They call me Tamblin Tam the Tambourine Man now," he says proudly.

They travelled to the festival together in a van, taking the backroads, "Roads I didn't even know existed!" Waters says. He came to the very first Glastonbury in 1970. "It was completely different then," he says, looking out across the sprawl of fields and people and fast food vans. "More gentle, not so commercial, a hippy thing. I came over from Stonehenge that year, and after the festival I stayed here and fasted for 10 days. The Hare Krishna people blessed the water from the well for me every day." He smiles a little mistily. "They were lovely times, like the birth of a sunflower. You could find love anywhere, even in a guitar, or a tambourine."

Highlights from Saturday's festival, and what to look forward to on Sunday, plus Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters on why the festival is so special for him; Tinie Tempah on UK hip-hop; Bassekou Kouyate playing live; and the Green Police's Glasto beat